The Challenge

A large health insurance company in the Northeast was losing customers and needed to enhance its digital technology to keep pace with competitors. The disruptive nature of the industry’s advancements had put the insurer at a competitive disadvantage: its customer experience was suffering; hardware and software were outdated; and IT couldn’t take on new projects. In addition, the insurer didn’t feel it had in-house developers who understood the speed and transparency expectations of Digital Age customers.

The insurer’s future was on the line. It could take radical steps to give customers more convenience and insight in managing their health care choices or it could scale back and yield its once-dominant position. The insurer decided to thrive and invest in a digital transition.

The Solution

Digital technology is changing health care on every imaginable front, and patients are using many of these advances to become more active and self-sufficient in managing their care.

Recognizing this trend, one of the largest health insurance firms in the northeastern United States identified improving the digital customer experience as pillar of its competitive strategy.

The company brought in a vice president to direct its digital transition, and he needed to move quickly.

One of the team’s primary goals was to develop a mobile app for the health insurance customers. The portal helps users easily access their benefits, get real-time updates on claims and deductibles, and chat securely in real-time with member services representatives.

The Solution cont.

“Doing it in-house would have been a lot more expensive and resource-intensive. Assembling the right teams, finding space — the logistics would have been painful,” the transition director says. “We had never had an app before. We wanted to go to market within six months, but we didn’t know whether it would take us nine months, a year or longer.

“Curate helped us figure out what it would take. Curate gave us designers and developers. They gave us an account manager, a product lead, and they project-managed and did concepts and designs,” he says. “The project manager was amazing; she seamlessly juggled teams across three time zones.”

The app was completed within six months and on budget. It had 40,000 downloads in the first month and reached more than 500,000 users in less than one year.